[TheRealThing]

Perhaps in Roger Williams' case the Framers liked borderline personalities, because his views and experience certainly influenced them.

I would add that Williams pre-dated the "days of the Founders" by, oh, 100 years.

Well, he was banging around over here for most of his life which was as you point out, pre-constitution days. But I thought the point you were making was that he influenced the framers, right?

Williams was a paradox. He came to America to escape persecution and oppression from the Church of England. And as you know, I have pointed out in times past that the unholy merging of he Crown and the Church resulted in great oppression to it's members. England in those times was the next thing to a theocracy.

Once he got to America he did in fact separate himself from the Church of England, which had by that time gotten a firm foothold here as well. Dismayed to realize that the corruption he fled in England was already rampant in the colonies, Williams refused to have anything else to do with it. He worked instead, extensively and lived among the native Indians. This is when it was determined that Williams was a bit off his nut. Though a devout Christian, and though he had become fluent in the Indian tongue, he none the less converted no one to the faith.

As I mentioned, the reason he would have nothing to do with the orthodoxy here in the US was because it had ties and was controlled in large degree by the mother Church in England. His ideas of separation were exactly as I have argued in the case of Jefferson who is no doubt who you think Williams influenced. Roger Williams wanted to keep the state out of Church business. He'd had all of the State Church he could stomach. The idea of the wall was to keep the State out of Church, nested safely behind the wall of separation, not to keep the church trapped within.

The State was guilty of tyranny against the Church, the wall would have in Williams mind, existed in matters of jurisprudence and stood against intrusion by the State. It appears I was a little hard on Mr Williams, my apologies to him. I had not considered that he aspired to the proper view of the concept of separation of Church and State. He might not have been so much with regard to Indian affairs as that applied in evangelical terms, but he had his ducks in a row on separation.